Highlights from the Archives

The Chick Lit genre has many mothers. It also has a father: Larry McMurtry, whose ''Terms of Endearment'' anticipated the kind of headstrong, dizzy, happily self-interested heroine who has since become so familiar. To be sure, Aurora Greenway's dating difficulties in that novel were a lot more geriatric than Bridget Jones's, and she had graver matters on her mind. But the freewheeling spirit of Aurora's escapades has cast a long shadow.

It is to Larry McMurtry's credit that his new novel, "The Evening Star," manages to provide us with a twist -- a happy unhappy family. No matter what disasters befall his characters -- and these include incarceration in prisons and psychiatric hospitals, as well as senility, just for starters -- not one of them ever loses our sympathy. Our patience, sometimes, but never our sympathy.

The disparity between the real West and the mythic West created by dime-store novels, cowboy movies and television shows has been the subject of Larry McMurtry's two most recent excursions into historical fiction. ''Lonesome Dove,'' set in the rough-and-tumble West of the 1870's, debunked the romantic myth of the trail drive, even as it created its own gallery of heroic cowboys and Indians. And ''Anything for Billy'' used the story of Billy the Kid to show the process whereby the sad, grubby facts of life are transformed into the white and shining stuff of legend.

December 19, 2014, Friday

The author, most recently, of “The Last Kind Words Saloon” says that meth-heads are the worst part of being a bookseller. “Anyone can walk into our bookstore in the age of meth — it’s a constant worry.”

After sorting through the sentences of the week submitted by readers, the flood of verbal excellence just about paralyzed me. Narrowing the candidates took some time, but I am now ready to share my findings.